The internet activist Aaron Swartz, seen here in January 2009, has died at the age of 26. Photograph: Michael Francis Mcelroy/AP
(updated below)

Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and internet freedom activist, committed suicide on Friday in New York at the age of 26. As the incredibly moving remembrances from his friends such as Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig attest, he was unquestionably brilliant but also - like most everyone - a complex human being plagued by demons and flaws. For many reasons, I
don't believe in whitewashing someone's life or beatifying them upon
death. But, to me, much of Swartz's tragically short life was filled
with acts that are genuinely and, in the most literal and noble sense,
heroic. I think that's really worth thinking about today.
At the
age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that
is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the
internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role in the creation of
Reddit, the wildly popular social networking news site. When Conde Nast
purchased Reddit, Swartz received a substantial sum of money at a very
young age. He became something of a legend in the internet and
programming world before he was 18. His path to internet mogul status
and the great riches it entails was clear, easy and virtually
guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting themselves to making more
and more money long after they have more than they could ever hope to
spend.
But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in
devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it
would have been for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done
nothing in his life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only
working for (at least his conception of) the public good."
Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately
believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and
knowledge as available as possible. Here he is in his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the movie-industry-demanded legislation that would have vested the government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet.
Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these causes merely by talking about
them or advocating for them. He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and
subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That's what
makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.
In 2008, Swartz targeted Pacer, the online service that provides access to court documents for a
per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that people were
forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at
public expense. Along with a friend, Swartz created a program to
download millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into
the public domain." For that act of civil disobedience, he was
investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never charged.
But in July 2011, Swartz was arrested for allegedly targeting JSTOR, the online publishing company that
digitizes and distributes scholarly articles written by academics and
then sells them, often at a high price, to subscribers. As Maria Bustillos detailed, none of the money goes to the actual writers (usually professors) who
wrote the scholarly articles - they are usually not paid for writing
them - but instead goes to the publishers.
This system offended
Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged
large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the
authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied
access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and
universities. The indictment filed against Swartz alleged that he used
his access as a Harvard fellow to the JSTOR system to download millions
of articles with the intent to distribute them online for free; when he
was detected and his access was cut off, the indictment claims he then
trespassed into an MIT computer-wiring closet in order to physically
download the data directly onto his laptop.
Swartz never
distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to
profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized
JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company's "terms of
service" by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested,
he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use
them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him
prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes.
But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes of the alleged "victims". Led by a federal prosecutor in Boston notorious for her overzealous prosecutions, the DOJ threw the book at
him, charging Swartz with multiple felonies which carried a total
sentence of several decades in prison and $1 million in fines.
Swartz's trial on these criminal charges was scheduled to begin in two months.
He adamantly refused to plead guilty to a felony because he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a convicted felon with all the stigma
and rights-denials that entails. The criminal proceedings, as Lessig put it, already put him in a predicament where "his wealth [was] bled dry,
yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to
fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court
judge."
To say that the DOJ's treatment of Swartz was excessive and vindictive is an extreme understatement. When I wrote about Swartz's plight last August, I wrote that he was "being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness". Timothy Lee wrote the definitive article in 2011 explaining why, even if all the allegations in the indictment are true, the only real crime committed by Swartz was basic trespassing, for
which people are punished, at most, with 30 days in jail and a $100
fine, about which Lee wrote: "That seems about right: if he's going to
serve prison time, it should be measured in days rather than years."
Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz so
vindictively, as though he had committed some sort of major crime that
deserved many years in prison and financial ruin. Some theorized that the DOJ hated him for his serial activism and civil disobedience.
Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it, "the feds were chasing down
all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in
the hopes of turning one of them."
I believe it has more to do with what I told the New York Times' Noam Cohen for an article he wrote on Swartz's case. Swartz's activism, I argued, was waged as part of one of the most vigorously contested battles - namely, the war over how the internet is used and who controls the information that flows on it -
and that was his real crime in the eyes of the US government:
challenging its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a
stranglehold on that information. In that above-referenced speech on
SOPA, Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom and free
expression and assembly posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with expansive interpretations of copyright law and other
weapons to limit access to information.
That's a major part of why I consider him heroic. He wasn't merely sacrificing himself for a
cause. It was a cause of supreme importance to people and movements
around the world - internet freedom - and he did it by knowingly
confronting the most powerful state and corporate factions because he
concluded that was the only way to achieve these ends.
Suicide is
an incredibly complicated phenomenon. I didn't know Swartz nearly well
enough even to form an opinion about what drove him to do this; I had a
handful of exchanges with him online in which we said nice things about
each other's work and I truly admired him. I'm sure even his closest
friends and family are struggling to understand exactly what caused him
to defy his will to live by taking his own life.
But, despite his public and very sad writings about battling depression, it only stands to reason that a looming
criminal trial that could send him to prison for decades played some
role in this; even if it didn't, this persecution by the DOJ is an
outrage and an offense against all things decent, for the reasons Lessig wrote today:
"Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just
Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the
beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize
what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron
had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the
hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit
from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a
stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear
what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had
caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

>"A kid genius. A soul, a

conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million
times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the
edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't
deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

>"For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial

crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought
to 'justice' never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be
labeled 'felons'."
Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a "justice" system that fully protects the most egregious
criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most
powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and
harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge
power.
Swartz knew all of this. But he forged ahead anyway. He
could have easily opted for a life of great personal wealth, status,
prestige and comfort. He chose instead to fight - selflessly, with
conviction and purpose, and at great risk to himself - for noble causes
to which he was passionately devoted. That, to me, isn't an example of
heroism; it's the embodiment of it, its purest expression. It's the
attribute our country has been most lacking.
I always found it
genuinely inspiring to watch Swartz exude this courage and commitment at such a young age. His death had better prompt some serious examination
of the DOJ's behavior - both in his case and its warped administration
of justice generally. But his death will also hopefully strengthen the
inspirational effects of thinking about and understanding the
extraordinary acts he undertook in his short life.
UPDATE
From the official statement of Swartz's family:
"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.
Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office
and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30
years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims.
Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own
community's most cherished principles."
This sort of
unrestrained prosecutorial abuse is, unfortunately, far from uncommon.
It usually destroys people without attention or notice. Let's hope - and work to ensure that - the attention generated by Swartz's case prompts
some movement toward accountability and reform.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Your message has been successfully submitted and would be delivered to recipients shortly.